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The Last Movie I Watched...

Elstree Calling (1930, Dir.: Alfred Hitchcock, Adrian Brunel)

Week 9.2: Elstree Calling

Elstree Calling is sort of an anomaly in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography. Technically, its primary director was Adrian Brunel, and Hitchcock is credited in the opening titles with "sketches and other interpolated items." When Francois Truffaut started to ask about the film, Britain's first musical comedy film, Hitchcock merely and bluntly replied, "Of no interest whatever," at which point, Truffaut quickly moved on to another topic. Hitch is known to be a little unforgiving of his own minor work in the Truffaut interviews however, and Ken Mogg writes that Elstree Calling "has more going for it than just the few moments directed by Hitchcock." Truly, it is a rather charming film. Talkies were still in their experimental infancy, and while Hollywood had already found sound technology great for producing lavish musical numbers, Britain was only just catching up to the fad, having first tackled darker, more serious content with an artistic and expressionist use of sound (compare Hollywood's first major talkie The Jazz Singer with Britain's Blackmail). Elstree Calling is overall an impressive display of musical virtuosity and entertainingly choreographed dancing. One of the film's most fascinating claims to fame is its history as an early color film. The film used an early mechanized stencil coloring process known as Pathecolor, which made the laborious hand-coloring of individual frames something that could be reasonable mass-produced and distributed to cinemas, which would lead to more advanced and effective techniques and companies such as Technicolor and Deluxe which would bring about the brightly colored films of the late 30s often incorrectly cited as the first color films (truthfully, color dates back to the dawn of film with many of Georges Melies early 20th century films being meticulously hand-colored frame by frame). Unfortunately, none of the color segments here were directed by Hitch (so Rope can continue its legacy as the Master's first color film), and the four color sequences presented here are not all that attractive, showcasing dirty yellows, dull muddy reds, a single instant of some inconsistently flickering green, all muddled in a rather bland brownish palette, but still the process must have been exciting for filmgoers who had not seen better. As Mogg said, there is much to like about this film beyond Hitchcock's involvement, but since this is a blog devoted to a year with the work of Alfred Hitchcock, the remainder of this entry will focus solely on his involvement with the picture.

The rather vague "sketches and other interpolated items by Alfred Hitchcock" credit refers actually to three key sequences for which Hitch is responsible: the recurring television gag starring Hitchcock regular Gordon Harker, the "Thriller" segment, and the climactic Taming of the Shrew burlesque.

Of most interest to fans of Hitchcock's early silent films is the recurring television gag. Since the film as a whole is essentially an anthology picture featuring 19 unrelated musical and comedic vignettes, a couple of running gags were included to lend the film a bit more continuity as a radio/television broadcast featuring the various talents. One of these running gags features Gordon Harker (the excellently expressive actor previously seen stealing the show in The Ring and The Farmer's Wife) as a bitter man competing with his neighbors to get the clearest picture on his television set of the broadcast. He returns throughout the film, tinkering with a bizarre and rather futuristic looking television set, getting no results, all the while his upstairs neighbor popping in to announce how well the show is being viewed upstairs. After an explosion, Harker, beaten, bandaged and war-weary finally defeats the technology and beats the set into submission by getting a clear signal, comically just as host Tommy Handley says "Goodnight everyone" at the very end of the film.

These sequences are funny, if obvious, and mostly of interest for Hitch's continued collaboration with Harker, whom he once referred to as the greatest character actor. The sequence is an interesting and cutting edge indictment of technology and the social class battle of having the best technology among your friends first. Regular television broadcasts had just begun in Britain one year earlier in 1929 so TV was still a novel invention which was likely still absent in most homes (due to patent difficulties, the US would not begin broadcasts until ten years later in 1939). Ken Mogg also notes that this sequence is largely an expansion of the similar but much shorter sequence in The Pleasure Garden in which the landlord and landlady struggle with their crystal radio set.

The greatest surprise in Elstree Calling for a Hitchcock student must be that it includes the most noticeably Hitchcockian direction of anything in his career thus far other than Blackmail. That lovely classic Hitchcock moment comes with the film's "Thriller" segment, which tells the story of an adulterous woman embracing her lover only to be surprised by the cuckolded husband. In a particularly Hitchcockian moment, the camera zooms in close on a passionate kiss between the wayward lovers before panning off of them, up and over to some curtains behind them. Suddenly, a hand reaches out from behind the curtains and then the sinister face of the wronged husband emerges too. We see tense and tight closeups of the husband removing the needle from a phonograph record, killing the music, and then we see him produce a pistol from his pocket. The entire sequence is the kind of masterfully shot crucible moment of suspense for which Hitchcock would be famous. The husband shoots twice, killing both young lovers as they die in a still embrace, and then keeping with the comedic genre of the film, the husband exclaims the punchline, "My God! I'm in the wrong flat!" Despite the comedic ending, the deft camerawork and heightened tension display an essential piece of Hitchcock's development of the Master of Suspense, tucked away in this unlikely place, a co-directed musical comedy variety film that most Hitchcock fans have either ignored or are totally oblivious about.

The final sketch that Hitch directed is a bizarre (Mogg calls it "surreal") burlesque adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew in which Donald Calthrop plays a Douglas Fairbanks inspired Petrucchio, riding a motorcycle with a mind of its own and brandishing a bullwhip intent on taming a Katherine who is a weirdly futuristically clad (almost Barbarella-like) woman, constantly kicking her chicken sidekick and hurling pies at everyone from her pedestal all culminating with the intrusion of a laughing Shakespeare himself (surreal indeed--this one must be seen to be believed). The sequence is bizarre and enjoyable, but not particularly Hitchcockian. It does sport the most lavish set of any of the other sketches which seems to speak to Hitch's grandiose mise en scene. Otherwise, there is not much here to mark it as Hitchcock's handiwork.

Overall, the film is an enjoyable detour in Hitchcock's career and one of which most are probably unaware. It is worth seeing for the "Thriller" segment alone, which is a true missing link of Hitchcock's evolution into the filmmaker we would later know him to be.

Note: It's worth mentioning, but not worth creating a separate post for, that also in 1930, Hitchcock directed a 10 minute short film entitled An Elastic Affair, which reportedly features Cyril Butcher and Aileen Despard as two award winners who are given contracts (instead of awards) with British International Pictures producer John Maxwell (who produced Elstree Calling). Presumable, this banal plot incorporated comedy in some way. The short was commissioned for an awards ceremony held at the London Palladium where it was screened on January 19, 1930. The 10 minutes of Hitchcock directed film now joins The Mountain Eagle as a totally lost film.

Join me this Hitchcock Friday, March 8th for The Skin Game.